Hokkaido Highway Blues

I threw the notebook away. I had made only the one entry.
    The passenger door swung open and a young woman with black satin hair leaned over and smiled at me. ‘American,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
     

4
     
    KAORI YAMAGUCHI WAS an English teacher at Ono Junior High, a small school up in the mountains. With only fourteen students, she was the English department. In the West, we are so captivated with images of crowded Tokyo subways and faceless salarymen that we forget how much of Japan is still rural and traditional. Granted, not much of it is out-and-out wild—there are precious few frontiers left—but farmlands and villages are still a big part of Japanese society. And the dominant color of Japan, the color that permeates the landscape and provides the backdrop of countless vistas, the color that is Japan is green—a deep, wet, tropical green. You will find very little greenery in most Japanese cities, true. But you will also find very little of Japan in most Japanese cities. The urban cores are exciting, crowded, jaded, but they are also the most Westernized, standardized stretches of the nation. Another Japan exists a half-step away, along the backroads, in the provincial capitals, on the outer edges.
    The highway Kaori and I were driving on ran low along the coast between . Kagoshima Bay and the rolling green mountains of the interior. There wasn’t a subway or a salaryman in sight.
    “Where are you going?” she asked.
    “Cape Sata.”
    “I used to live near Sata,” she said. “There is nothing there and it is very hard to reach. It is maybe three hours away.” You could see the burden of duty descend upon her. “I am sorry, but I cannot take you all the way to Sata. I am very busy. I’m sorry.”
    I have a cruel streak, and for a minute I was tempted to force her to drive me to Sata simply by asking. That’s all it would have taken. But I didn’t. Maybe it was the necktie and maybe it was the crew cut; I felt strangely charitable. “You don’t have to drive me to Sata. Really. Just down the road is fine.” She was almost sick with worry at this point. “But no one will stop for you. Japanese people don’t pick up hitchhikers.”
    “But you’re Japanese, and you did.”
    She ignored my powerful Western logic. “There are buses,” she said. “You should take a bus instead. And after Sata, where will you go?”
    “Hokkaido.”
    When I said this she laughed, covering her mouth with one hand in that highly annoying, yet oddly endearing way Japanese women have. Then her expression changed as she realized I wasn’t kidding. Instead of shuttling me farther down the coast, she turned and drove inland. We came up onto a plateau and Kanoya City engulfed us.
    “Is this the, ah, way to Sata?” I asked.
    She smiled and said, “Can you eat Japanese food?”
    Kaori drove me smack into the middle of town and, with a friendly wave and tally-ho, she abandoned me. Now I was lost. Trying to hitchhike out of a city center is like trying to find an exit after being spun around three times with your eyes shut. My cleverly improvized strategy involved wandering about hopelessly in all directions with my thumb extended before me like a divining rod. It worked. I was rescued “within minutes.”
     
    * * *
     
    His name was Mr. Migita and he was driving a big boat of a car, shiny-black and filled with kids. In the front seat was his daughter, a junior-high-school student simply agog at the sight of me, and in the back were his two sons, around seven and five years old.
    Mr. Migita asked me where I was going and when I said Cape Sata, he told me I was heading in the wrong direction. He offered to take me back out to the coast, so I crawled in and faced the gaping stares of the two boys. You could tell what they were thinking: Dad’s gone mad. It was as though their father had let a large bear into the backseat.
    Mr. Migita looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Can you speak Japanese?”
    “Sort of,” I said. (Unless noted, the conversations in this book were originally in Japanese. Or at least something that resembles Japanese.)
    The younger boy, Hidenori, was becoming suspicious. ‘Are you American?” No. “Then you’re Japanese.” No. “Well, if you aren’t American and you aren’t Japanese, what are you?”
    Put like that, I wasn’t quite sure. “I’m a tanuki,“ I said, and they burst into peals of laughter.
    “You’re not a tanuki!”
    “Sure I am.” Tanuki are